Today’s story comes to us from Glen Engel-Cox. Glen thinks more about authors and writing than anyone outside of the offices of The Paris Review, who has never published him. He emails a daily newsletter about literature as part of his Patreon account: join for free at patreon.com/gengelcox. His novel, Darwin’s Daughter, and a non-fiction compilation, First Impressions, can be found at A Major Annoying zero-paying online site, while his short fiction is available for free in The Daily Tomorrow, Phano,, LatineLit, Utopia, and elsewhere. 

Glen’s story has been [Mistakenly] rejected by Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Apex, Solarpunk, Utopia, and a few others.

When I asked Glen what he loves about this story, this was his answer:

What I love about this story is how it’s a kind of a throwback to the 50s SF of writers like Fredric Brown, where the aliens are cute and the stories are a bit cozy. So much SF now (well, and maybe always has been) is dystopian, dark views of horrible futures and I wanted to see if I could bring a little joy to the world.

The Mass Market and the Madness of Crowds, by Glen Engel-Cox

After being jostled for the third time by the crowd in the vendor’s booth, Jean lost her temper and swore, causing the entire room to chuckle at her loss of decorum. Even though she towered over most of the crowd by a meter–too much time spent in zero-G–most of the crowd pushing her weighed at least twenty kilos more than she did and some of them a lot more.

As an asteroid field miner, she had grown accustomed to isolation and the fact not many human women chose the profession, but it still galled her when she had to deal with the crowds that inhabited most spaceports. On board her ship, as small as it might be, everything had its place. She had difficulty dealing with movement that didn’t follow predictable paths, which meant anything with intelligence, or what passed for the same by her fellow miners. She couldn’t avoid the spaceports, either, because that’s where ore was sold and where she had to refuel. She needed some dense mass to power her entropic drive, and the cheapest way to buy some was in the open market. In too many ways, being a miner and having to buy mass was ironic. The ore in her hold, however, was unrefined, and she knew from the mass spectroscopy that it only had trace amounts of heavy metals. 

This particular market was called the Masshole, situated in the center of an orbital Altarean habitrail. It dealt in things other than mass, but, really, when it came down to it, everything was mass, wasn’t it?

“Wait your turn,” said the vendor. That’s not why Jean had sworn, but it wouldn’t do any good to complain. She turned on her heels and left the booth, likely to more laughter. The market had plenty of vendors and she was damned if she was going to spend any more time in this one.

Jean really shouldn’t have gotten annoyed but she hadn’t had much luck in finding what she needed, not at a price she could afford. Realizing she needed to calm down, she sought out a lunch place with food she could eat. Given all the different alien communities on this habitrail, she found that almost as difficult but eventually she found a noodle shop off one of the main passages. The inside was crowded as well, but, unlike the last vendor, this line moved fast. She sat down at a table outside and proceeded to slurp up her meal.

Across the way, she watched an altercation break out between a very short, stocky alien who looked like an asteroid with spiderlimbs and a real bruiser of a human, one of those brawny miners who swaggered down the hallways without giving any room to others. Jean couldn’t tell if the human had stepped on a limb or pushed the alien out of the way, but given the way it gestured, she felt a fight was imminent. She glanced around, but those around her seemed to be ignoring the rapidly increasing tension. She swore under her breath, but got up and walked over and put herself between the two of them and yelled, using her height to get them to focus away from each other and up to where she glared at them.

“Stay out of this,” said the human. “This pebble needs to learn a lesson.”

“Crack you,” said the alien.

“Both of you should turn around and go your separate ways. We don’t need a interspecies war starting here.”

“Who made you the judge?”

“You did, right now. Now go.”

He glared at her, but he had shifted his focus away from the alien, which is what had to happen to get him to settle down. She held his eyes, then flicked her hand away. He grunted and turned, knocking into her with his shoulder as he moved down the hall, hands on his hips as he took even more space as he left, others in the hall giving way.

When he was outside of hearing range, she knelt down on one knee and asked the alien, “Are you hurt?”

“Hurt? What hurt?”

“Damaged? Injured?” She looked at him, trying to find what it used as sensory organs but only seeing crags and crevices.

It waved one limb, a thin, black multi-segmented chitinous thing. “Crush this.” She could see some segments that seemed flattened somewhat.

“Do you need medical assistance?”

It flexed the appendage. “Fix self.”

Well, that was good. The human must have stepped on it accidentally, not unsurprising in these crowded halls if you didn’t pay attention to those around you.

“Alright, then. You be careful. You have to watch after yourself around here, you know.”

Jean went back to my noodles, finding in her absence the proprietor had come out and topped the dish off so they were still hot. They nodded to her as she sat down. “That was a nice thing you did there.”

She shrugged, looking back over at the alien, who had now been joined by another of its kind and they waved their spindly arms about in agitation.

“So who are they?” Jean asked.

“Miturarnians. Came aboard about sixty, seventy cycles ago. Great maintenance workers. Not only are those appendages of theirs extremely flexible, they don’t seem to breath air so can go out into vacuum without bulky suits.” Given there had to be over a thousand-odd space-faring species inhabiting the nine galaxies, it was impossible to know them all in detail, and more seemed to pop up everyday. “Most all ETV work has been given over to them and it’s been a good deal, as far as I understand. Other hab authorities are desperate to get them to move and take work with them, but there’s only so many of them, it seems. Anyway, I better get back to cooking.”

Jean watched the two aliens while she finished her lunch. They had stopped gesticulating and now seemed to be frozen in place forcing the hallway traffic to divert around them.

#

She went back to seeking a mass dealer whose idea of profit was something less than a two-hundred percent markup. But they seemed to sense her desperation, even reveled in it, increasing their prices from stall to stall. She suspected they had a private network where they communicated, her mug shot stamped online with big letters RUBE.

After hours of this, she stopped at an outside bar and took inventory. She had a commitment for   some platinum, but it would hardly be enough to power her beyond one trip and if something went wrong…well, she didn’t like to work with those margins.

She felt something tug on her trousers. She looked down and saw a mituarian retract a pincer.

“You mine?” it asked. She couldn’t tell where it made the sound from, but it had a grating quality to it like ore being ground.

“Yeah.”

“Have need. Take job?”

Jean looked around the bar, but no one was paying attention to them. She said, “I work for myself. Freelance, you know. Hit the asteroid belt, hope to hit a jackpot someday. I don’t work for anyone else.”

“Pay good. What want?”

Jean chuckled. “What I need is some really dense mass for my entropic drive so I can go further into the fields without constantly coming back here to refuel.”

“Have mass! Much mass!” It tapped itself with its appendage.

Jean shook her head. The little being didn’t understand. “Not mass like you or me, but dense stuff.”

“Big mass. I have.” It motioned for her to follow it. She told it to wait while she finished her drink. No need to waste decent alcohol in case this was some wild asteroid chase.

Following the mituarian, she watched as it moved down the hallway, its appendages basically rolling it along the hall. No wonder one of them had been stepped on earlier. The alien shifted to the right or left constantly rather than moving straight. It led her into the heart of the Hab, the center point where the centrifugal force didn’t act on you to provide gravity. She activated her mag boots, finding her own movements awkward while the alien’s locomotion now had a fluidity indicating how accustomed they were to weightlessness. Finally, it motioned for her to enter what she took to be its berth.

“Big mass?” Jean asked.

“Most big. And dense.”

Jean stepped inside. Inside the small room not much larger than the interior of her mining ship, the mituarnian made a ceremony of retrieving and unveiling a casket lined in exquisite fur with half-a-dozen orbs nestled inside, each the size of Jean’s hand and made of pure black. Jean’s eyes went wide. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Now she understood why it brought her here. The weight of those would tunnel a hole in the floor or walls in the market area with its normal gravity.

“Told you. Dense. Big mass.”

“SubQ?” Jean asked, hardly daring to speak the name. Hab maintenance work must pay well if this alien could afford to own SubQ.

“You know. I got. What worth?”

A fortune. One of those orbs would power her ship for a lifetime and beyond. Jean shook her head. “More than I got.”

“You need?”

“Badly.”

“You mine?”

“Yes, I’m a miner.” She thought they had established that already.

“I need. We go. I show. You mine. SubQ yours.”

Jean squinted at the mituarnian. She normally worked solo. Having someone on her ship made her nervous, especially a client telling her what to do. But for an orb of SubQ? She didn’t hesitate. “Deal.”

#

The coordinates it gave her took them to a double-star on the edge of the Altar system. Following the jump, which the mituarnian efficiently paid by providing her with a pebble of platinum, it directed her toward a planetoid, unusual for its multiple rings rather than a singular one on the elliptical.

The mituarnian then activated a homing beacon, directing her to a specific spot in one of the inner rings. “Here.” The one it chose did look different than the others, an oblong rock about half the size of her ship with spider veins visible on the surface. “Take care. It fast.”

Fast in space was a relative term, but Jean thought she understood its warning.

She matched the orbital speed of the asteroids circling the planet, each ring moving at a different velocity, so she had to deftly maneuver in and around the deadly rocks until finally getting to the specific one the mituarnian wanted mined.

“What are we mining for?”

“You see. It fast. You hit. It break. Then fast. Suck up. NO GRIND.” The last it said with great emphasis.

“Ok, ok.” She showed it the grind mechanism control. “With this off, it will just collect and won’t grind the ore.”

“Not ore,” it said. “Mass.”

Whatever, Jean thought. “Any particular spot to hit?” During the jump, the mituarnian had told her not to use her drill, but to use the particle hammer.

“Here. Or there. Your pick. But hard. Hard hard.”

She activated the gravity collector, directing the hammer to use maximum force while firing the ship’s plasma engines to counter the reaction from the force used. As soon as the impact occurred, the asteroid cracked, each spider vein suddenly red and then nonexistent, the rock splitting and resplitting into thousands of tinier asteroids, which were then sucked up into the hopper by the collector. She had seen nothing like it.

The mituarnian watched with delight. “All! All!” it exclaimed, the collector gathering up every bit of the asteroid in seconds.

“We see. Come come.” It led her to the hold, now sealed against space after the collector had finished. “Open open! We see!”

Jean popped open the hatch and looked inside. She had expected a collection of rocks. Instead, the hopper was filled with tiny miniature mituarnians screaching and clambering over each other. An asteroid hatchery. Newborns.

“Much mass! It good. SubQ yours.”

She felt light-headed watching the baby aliens. So many of them she couldn’t see the floor or the sides of the hopper. It was madness, but Jean didn’t care. If being midwife to mituarians enabled her to seal her future, she would learn to like some crowds.